Our History

In 2005, Hector Barajas, Kyle Darmon & Eric Olsen, aspiring Illustrators, met at the American Academy of Art. Almost immediately they became friends as they shared several common interests in art, comics, and good storytelling.

In 2007, after several years of reverence and camaraderie, the idea to start a geek driven news blog came up during comic book convention. Though the idea was only teased, things began rolling shortly after, and by early 2008 the gang had recorded their first podcast The Fanriot Podcast. After several articles, podcasts, and a handful conventions later, Hector, Kyle and Eric decided to expand the blog by adding several other bloggers, editors, and hosts, that included Lorne Jones (Dead Pixels of the Internet), Robin Nunez, Juan Sandoval and Sara Cruz. Shortly after, 2 new podcasts were added to the roster. Fanriot FM and The Fanriot’s Quickies.

FanriotFM was recorded by Hector Barajas and Sara Cruz, and was specific to movies and TV shows. Quickies was a short 30-minute podcast, that they limited to 1 big topic. Currently, the Geektout podcast has replaced Quickies.

Between 2008-2011, nearly 35+ podcast was recorded, then after a short break, 10 more were recorded in 2012.

The beginning of the end…

In the summer of 2011, after a mistake at the domain provider, TheFanriot.com was bought off by a reseller. Later, the reseller attempted to sell back the domain name, but at several thousands of dollars, which at the time the team couldn’t afford. The team ended up changing the site name to TheFanriotPodcast.com and moved forward into 2012 with 10 more podcasts.

However, shortly after the 10th podcast, something terrible occurred. The servers crashed and everything on them was erased. Years of articles and podcast were gone in an instant.

At the time, cloud space was very expensive, so the audio was all stored locally. The backup data transfers also became corrupted, and the only data that was salvaged was the 10 episodes recorded in 2012, which can be found at Podomatic. After several misfortunes, the gang decided to put the project on hold.

Rebirth…

In 2014, after several years on hold, TheFanriot.com domain became available and Hector jumped on the opportunity to snatch it back up. After almost a 3 year hiatus, Hector and Kyle began to play with the idea of getting the website and podcast going again. The current abundance of cloud space and hardware available has made it the perfect time to kick-start the site and podcast.

Hector spend the next 5 months rebuilding the website from the ground up. A beta version of the website went live in March 2015, and Hector and Kyle began producing 2 podcasts a week, compared to 2 podcasts a month from the years before. After only one month, the site has received 6,496 hits and is continuing to grow as the site progresses.

Hector and Kyle are determined now more than ever to continue with the success of the website TheFanriot.com, and the podcasts The Fanriot Podcast and Geektout. Plans are currently being made to cover several conventions, including C2E2, Wizard World Chicago, Anime Central, Anime Midwest, and much more. In addition, several more contributors will be joining the team in the near future, so the team is excited about what the future holds! Stay tuned!